Friday, April 19, 2013

Boston Bombings and Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau’s comments about root causes and the Boston bombing are
perfectly sensible.

They show a politician who has something substantive to say.

The comments are also consistent with sensible politicians of
all political stripes.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, following the Oslo terror attacks, was
widely quoted saying “we have to demonstrate and persevere and work together to
try to find the root causes but also try to pre-empt and interrupt these types
of attacks”.

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

The media and the conservatives want everyone to make the trivial soundbity comments everyone makes when a tragedy occurs. When Justin makes a thoughtful reasonable attempt to consider why something happens they jump all over him and tell him it is not appropriate. I think it is appropriate to try to figure these things out and I bet the victims do too.

But, The Rat, if you turn on a US news station today, chances are you'll hear the words "root causes" in connection with Boston. Lots of people are talking about it, trying to understand. Maybe partly to understand why, and partly to understand if anything can be done to prevent this.

Trudeau says that this happened because the person(s) who did this was "excluded", yet prior to that interview, we knew absolutely NOTHING about who carried out the act. So how can he be sure this person(s) did this because they was "excluded"? It could have been ANY other reason the person would have had to justify it, and we didn't know yet at that point, but somehow Trudeau did?

Trudeau was quick to take a morally neutral position. At best is ill advised, at worst borders on sympathy. Reminds me of Chretien mentioning poverty as a cause for 911. The 24 year old Boston terrorist drove a late model Mercedes.

Times like these call for a Rudy Giuliani. He refused Saudi money after 911 when they blamed US foreign policy. http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/11/rec.giuliani.prince/

Our so-called democracy has come to a sad state when thoughtful comments are condemned and memorized and regurgitated talking points are the norm. It is shocking that the pestilence of character assassination ads have been imported from the USA. The media is obsessed with the content of ads themselves instead of either ignoring the garbage or at least questioning why we are having to put up with this crap.

"Trudeau spoke in the passive voice, about people who "feel excluded." It's possible to feel excluded for no good reason at all. Yet the implication lingers, it is that if people "feel excluded," somebody is excluding them. It's easy to draw the inference from Trudeau's words that he thinks the real culprit in cases of terrorism is this unknown excluder, not the unfortunate victim of exclusion who merely detonated the bomb that was somehow prepared for him by vaguely oppressive social forces.

In Justin Trudeau's comments on the Boston attack, we see a worrying formula: first, emphatic certainty ("there is no question"), expressed (as Andrew notes) vaguely and incoherently, all in service of an idea that is objectively wrong. Overconfident and mistaken: that is not the stuff of which successful prime ministers are made."